Volume 32 · Issue 2

Fall 1998

ARTICLE

“To Defend the Bible in This Year 1798 Would Cost a Man His Life”

by Morton D. Paley

[A plenary lecture at the joint meeting (“1798 and Its Implications”) of the British
Association for the Study of Romanticism and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism at St.
Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, on 6 July 1998.]

For most of us here 1798 was above all the year of the Lyrical Ballads. But it
was also, as we all know, the year of Napoleon in Egypt, the uprising of the United Irishmen and its bloody
aftermath, of Malthus’s first Essay on Population, and the year of (as Ian McCalmon puts
it) “the most draconian, anti-radical crackdown of the entire Pittite ‘Terror’” (“New Jerusalems”
26) For William Blake, it was a seemingly unexceptional year, a year for which there are no known letters and
no known published works other than some commerical engravings. But it was also the year in which he wrote on
the verso of the title page of Bishop Richard Watson’s An Apology for the Bible: “To
defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life” and then “The Beast and the Whore rule
without controls.”1↤ 1 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, rev. ed., 1982) 611. This edition will hereafter be cited as E, with page
number(s) following. G. E. Bentley, Jr., in William Blake’s Writings, reads the last word
of the second line as “control.” In his excellent edition of the Annotations, G.
Ingli-James reads it as “control” with a deleted last letter, as do I. The Bishop’s
Apology was an attack upon The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, and
Blake’s notes were a vehement counter-attack upon Bishop Watson. Why should Blake want to defend Thomas
Paine, with whom he had some important points of disagreement, so unequivocally? That is my subject today,
along with the place these annotations have in the development of Blake’s thought, including just what he
meant by the two sentences quoted. Say first! what mov’d Blake?

History has not been kind to Richard Watson, D.D., Bishop of Landaff, sometime Regius Professor
of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. His Apology for the Bible was celebrated in its
day. It had first appeared in 1796, and the 1797 edition that Blake owned was its eighth at the time. It had
also been published widely in America. Every Harvard student was given a copy! In the Anecdotes
of the Life of Richard Watson, published by his son in 1817, Watson included fan letters from a society
for discountenancing vice in Dublin and from the Convention of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. He also
asserted that an employer had printed off 3000 copies for distribution to his workers, and declared that many
thousands more were sold in Scotland and in England at a small price “without any profit or wish of profit
to myself.” (It was still going strong in 1817—a new edition is advertised in the end papers to the
Anecdotes.)

Yet the only reason that Richard Watson is remembered today is he that he was attacked by two
great poets, neither of whom even published his remarks. In 1793, William Wordsworth wrote but did not publish
“A Letter to the Bishop of Landaff . . . By a Republican” (Prose Works 1: 32-49) in
reply to Watson’s defense of the British constitution in an appendix to an earlier sermon. Wordsworth wrote:
“It is feared that you have at last fallen, through one of the numerous trap-doors, into the tide of
contempt to be swept down to the ocean of oblivion” (Prose Works 1: 31); however,
Wordsworth is decorum itself compared to Blake, who calls the Bishop “a State trickster” (E 612) and
refers to his “cloven foot” (616). It isn’t fair. Bishop Watson, as Florence Sandler has pointed out in
an excellent essay, had opposed the American War, advocated the abolition of the slave trade, favored the
enlargement of the franchise, and spoken for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. He was a proponent
of Roman Catholic emancipation, and was long known as “the dissenters’ bishop.” The
Anecdotes documents his broadmindedness. When the University of Cambridge proposed an address to
the King in 1775 exhorting him to continue the American War, Bishop Watson actively engaged himself in
opposition, but had to report “The Tories beat us by eight votes . . . they owe their victory to the
ministerial troops, which were poured in from the Admiralty, Treasury, &c. beyond expectation” (57).
Bishop Watson originally had high hopes for the French Revolution. “In 1792,” he writes, “I published a
Charge in which I had touched upon unpopular subjects—the advantages which would probably result to human
society from the French Revolution. . .and the injustice and impolicy of our Test and Corporation Acts”
(257). William Pitt, he tells us, rejected his arguments. He also prints a speech he made in the House of
Lords on 15 January 1795, supporting the Duke of Bedford’s motion for negotiations for peace with France
(Burke’s “Regicide Peace”). “Suppose, then,” Bishop Watson asks, “the unfortunate Louis to be
placed, by our efforts, on the throne of his ancestors, surrounded by his nobles in the plenitude of their
ancient privilege; the bastile re-erected, and the people of France,—Heaven avert that part of the event!)
once more crouching under the rod of despotic power, what advantage will Great Britain derive from this
change?” (283). Asserting “I consider it as a Christian
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1 Back of title page.
“The Beast & the Whore rule without controlx” has been lightly lined through. At the end
of the last word in that sentence a letter has been heavily inked out. Note that the sense of “Read
patiently” and what follows is that Blake has finished reading Watson’s book and is advising an implied
reader of these annotations as to how to approach it. Courtesy of the Huntington Library and Art
Gallery.

effort of a humane people to put a stop to the effusion of blood” (281), he was the only Bishop to vote for
the Duke of Bedford’s motion. Could Bishop Watson appear to us today, hovering in the darksome air like a
Blakean apparition, he might cry out the words W. H. Auden gives to Herod in the “Christmas Oratorio”
For the Time Being: “I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been
born.” (125).

Perhaps there just is no justice for a man who in 1793 could publish sermons under the title
The Wisdom and Goodness of God in Having Made Both Rich and Poor. (Incidentally, Blake’s note
next to the title of this book—“God
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2 Untitled preface facing the verso of the title page.
Blake’s note in the top margin is written in pencil. Courtesy of the Huntington Library and Art
Gallery.

made Man happy & rich but the Subtil made the innocent Poor” (E 612)—is in line with Paine’s own
reply to Watson, Agrarian Justice. “It is wrong to say God made Rich and
Poor,” Paine wrote, alluding to Watson’s title; “he only made Male
and Female; and he gave them the earth for their inheritance.”2↤ 2 Page 5.
Paine says he wrote the pamphlet in 1795-96 and decided to publish it after seeing the pamphlet listed (as did
Blake) in Watson’s Apology. In any event, my purpose here is not to do justice to Bishop
Watson, which I must leave to some other realm. It is, rather, to consider Blake’s annotations to Watson’s
book. And we should note that Blake didn’t annotate his copy of Watson’s Apology all at
once or with equal attention to every part. An examination of the original in the Huntington Library shows
that, although most of Blake’s notes are in ink, the notes on at least four pages were written in pencil;
and on page 1, two of the notes were written with a much finer nib than the rest. Furthermore, as E. B.
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Murray (146) points out, Blake wrote some of his comments, such as the two paragraphs about public records, in
a hasty scrawl. All this suggests more than one attack upon Watson’s text, though they could been made at
short intervals. Furthermore, Blake’s attention was not sustained. The pages of front matter and the first
17 numbered pages all bear notes, then Blake’s interest begins to lag and only four of the next 12 are
annotated. From page 37 through 47 and again from 50 through 94, from 96 through 107, and from 110-16 there
are no notes at all, suggesting that Blake skimmed through or over what adds up to about half the book. At
page 117 he returned to the fray, writing notes on the last four pages of the book, concluding that “Tom
Paine is a better Christian than the Bishop” and that “the Bishop has only hurt Paines heel, while Paine
has broken his head” (E 620). I begin, then, with Thomas Paine.

That Blake knew Thomas Paine is not in doubt, although the myth that Blake saved Paine’s life,
transmitted from Frederick Tatham to Alexander Gilchrist for Gilchrist’s life of Blake, has long been
exploded. Tatham was also the source of the claim that “in their conversations, Paine said that religion was
a law and a tye to all able minds,” while “Blake . . . said what he was always asserting, that the
religion of Jesus, was a perfect law of Liberty . . .” (Blake Records 41n). This doesn’t
sound right. Paine typically used “law” not for restraint—that is the “Blakean” meaning—but for
freedom; time and again he contrasts the government of law in a republic with the government
of kings. Similarly unconvincing is Samuel Palmer’s statement to Gilchrist that “Blake rebuked the
profanity of Paine” (Blake Records 41n); in an age when language was ridden with
profanity, no one else has remarked that Blake objected to it. Of course this doesn’t mean that no
conversations with Paine took place. Blake had probably spoken of them to his two much younger friends, but
some thirty years later they recollected them according to the current state of their own memories and
beliefs—Tatham had become a member of Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church, Palmer a conservative Anglican.
(John Linnell, a reliable reporter, wrote “Paine” in a list of subjects he prepared for discussion with
Gilchrist [Blake Records 319n]). Blake probably met Paine at one or more of the publisher
Joseph Johnson’s weekly gatherings. Paine of course was already famous for his Common
Sense when he returned to England, and he became even more celebrated for The Rights of
Man, published in 1791, said to have sold approximately 200,000 copies in a population of about six
million.3↤ 3 See Michael Phillips, “Blake and the Terror,” The Library,
6th ser., 6 (1994): 276, citing an anonymous Impartial Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine
(London, 1973). The publication of its second
part in 1792 caused Paine to be charged with seditious libel. More must be said in a moment about these books,
which caused Blake to write Paine into his America and to give him an especially prominent
place among the “fierce Americans” who rise to defend their continent against Albions Angel.

Paine first appears in America as one of a carefully selected group of seven:
“Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Hancock, & Green” (3: 4, E 52). The list is balanced
between men known primarily as soldiers and as civilians, although some were of course both. In a second list
of seven, there are two substitutions, but Paine remains; and in two other contexts the seven are distilled to
three: “Washington / And Paine and Warren with their foreheads toward the east” (9: 10-11; see also 12:
7). Washington’s presence is of course inevitable. Warren’s importance lies in his being a heroic martyr.
(A doctor by profession, he was killed at Bunker Hill and portrayed in John Trumbull’s Death of
General Warren as a dying Christ being bayoneted by an English soldier.4↤ 4 D. W. Dörrbecker observes that Warren wrote for the Boston
Gazette under the name “True Patriot” (Continental Prophecies 129). The
Trumble Death of Warren was part of a series of eight paintings begun in 1784. See Ronald
Paulson, “John Trumbull and the Representation of the American Revolution,” Studies in
Romanticism 21 (1982): 341-56. ) Paine’s special prominence lies of course in his being a
writer, specifically, as far as America is concerned, the author of Common
Sense, in which Paine wrote “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
Some of his other statements there would have struck a particular resonance in Blake. “Government, like
dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of
paradise” (67). Paine appeals to scripture to prove that “the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon
and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of the government of kings” (72). Like Blake, Paine uses
biblical typology to convey some of his meanings. The rights of kings are made parallel in Common
Sense to the doctrine of original sin, which of course Paine rejects:

For as in Adam all sinned, and as in the first electors all men obeyed; as in the one all mankind were
subjected to Satan, and in the other to Sovereignty; as our innocence was lost in the first, and our authority
in the last; and as both disable us from re-assuming some former state and privilege, it unanswerably follows
that original sin and hereditary succession are parallels. (77)

George III is “the hardened, sullen, Pharaoh of —,” and he sounds a lot like Blake’s
Noboddaddy when Paine calls him “the wretch, that with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE can
unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood on his soul” (87).

3 Verso of preface, facing page 1.
Blake carefully links his marginal note to three words of text. Courtesy of the
Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

. . . If they rebel they must go to hell
They shall have a Priest & a passing bell
(E 499)

In a population of a little over three million, Common Sense sold over 100,000
copies. Blake’s comment appears in the Annotations to Watson, in which Paine is daringly paralleled with
Jesus: “Is it a greater miracle to feed five thousand men with five loaves than to overthrow all the armies
of Europe with a small pamphlet” (E 617).

But wasn’t Paine a deist and wasn’t Blake opposed to everything that deism represented? The
answer to the first question is certainly yes. “Adam, if there ever was such a man, was created a deist,”
Paine asserts in The Age of Reason (55). But the answer to the second must give us pause. A
glance at the Concordance shows that Blake did not even use the word “deist” or its
cognates before writing the Annotations to Watson.

The first instance is, in fact, in those annotations, but it was revised out by Blake as follows:
“The Deists say that
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4 Page 1.
The annotations around the title “Letter I” and those to the right of it were written with a
finer nib than the rest. Courtesy of the Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

Christianity put a stop to improvement & the Bishop has not shewn the contrary” (E 615). For “The
Deists say” Blake substituted “Paine says.” So “Paine” is here interchangeable with “the Deists”
but in both instances, Blake appears to be indicating either neutrality or outright agreement. This is a far
cry from Blake’s later vehement denunciations of “Deism” as expressed in the last three lines of Night
VIII of The Four Zoas:

The Ashes of Mystery began to animate they calld it Deism
And Natural Religion as of old so now anew began
Babylon again in Infancy Calld Natural Religion.
(111: 22-24, E 386)

“Natural Religion” may, of course, be equated with deism and Blake had indeed entitled a
tractate etched in 1788 THERE is NO Natural Religion. However, there his attitude is
benignly ironical and gently corrective: he attempts to show that Natural Religion is self-undermining and
that the very perception of nature takes us into a realm of imagination—or as Blake puts it at this time,
Poetic Genius—that
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is beyond nature. With one exception, the words “Natural Religion” do not appear again in Blake’s
writings until the Vala passage just quoted (or in Milton, whichever was
earlier). That exception is in the Annotations to Watson, where in a riposte to the Bishop Blake writes:
“Natural Religion is the voice of God & not the result of reasoning on the powers of Satan” (E
614).5↤ 5 As pointed out by
Essick 210. In the case of Paine, Blake at
this time could well take the attitude expressed by the Unitarian minister Gilbert Wakefield, whose
The Spirit of Christianity, Compared with the Spirit of the Times in Great Britain, with its
denunciation of “the Moloch Priest” and “worshippers of Baal” in the Anglican Church, was a strong
influence on Coleridge’s Religious Musings. Writing of the Master and fellows of Queens
College, Wakefield said “I would give with rapture to a French Deist, as purity and
perfection, compared with such apostates to the liberty and sanctity of the gospel . . .” (16). The truth is
that many of the attitudes that we think of as characteristic of Blake were not yet his in 1798. In Blake’s
account of the founders of religions in The Song of Los (1795), Jesus is treated no better
than the rest: “(a man of sorrows) he recievd / A Gospel from wretched Theotormon” (3: 23-24, E
67)—Theotormon being, of course, the God-tormented and self-tormented man of Visions of the
Daughters of Albion. Note that this negative reference is not merely to the Christian
church but to Christianity itself. Of course there are also positive references—the Jesus of
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell who “was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from
rules” (E 43). But how far is this from Paine’s view of Jesus as “a virtuous reformer and
revolutionist” in The Age of Reason?

Why Blake should with to defend Paine requires little explanation. There is a considerable
overlap between Blakean discourse in the 1790s and Paine’s in Rights of Man. One aspect of
this, on the subject of charters, was remarked by the late E. P. Thompson, in his excellent essay on Blake’s
“London,” and on this subject I will only point further to the proximity in Blake’s poem of two key
words that occur in one of Paine’s discussions of “chartered monopolies” (75) “Every chartered
town,” writes Paine, “is an aristocratical monopoly in itself, and the qualification of electors proceeds
out of these chartered monopolies.” Shortly after this, Paine says: “Conquest and tyranny transplanted
themselves with William the Conqueror from Normandy into England, and the country is yet disfigured with the
marks.” Are these disfiguring “marks” not the “marks of weakness, marks of woe,” Blake discerned in
every face he met in the “charterd streets” of “London”? Both can use figures from Bunyan similarly,
as when Paine writes that the “compounded image” of the downfall(s) of the Bastille and Despotism become
“as figuratively united as Bunyan’s Doubting Castle and Giant Despair” (52). Blake and Paine share with
other radicals of the 1790s the association of revolution with fire, but a sentence from part 2 of
The Rights of Man comes particularly close to Blake’s statement that “France reciev’d the
Demons light” (E 57) from America. “From a small spark kindled in America,” wrote Paine, “a flame has
arisen, not to be extinguished. Without consuming, like the ultima Ratio Regum, it winds its
progress from nation to nation and conquers by a silent operation “(210). When we come to The
Age of Reason, we find that this overlap continues. Paine refers to the establishment as “the
adulterous connection of church and state” (87), bringing to mind passages in Blake like the one in
Vala in which Rahab is “the deluded harlot of the kings of the earth” (E 363). When Paine
characterizes the biblical account of the creation, it sounds much like much like a summary of the early
chapters of The [First] Book of Urizen: “It is nobody that speaks. It is nobody that
hears. It is addressed to nobody. It has neither first, second, not third person” (12). Paine can also apply
biblical typology after his own fashion, casting himself as the doubting Thomas of scripture. Observing that
this apostle did not believe in the resurrection, Paine remarks “So neither will I; and
the reason is equally as good for me and for every other person as for Thomas” (6).6↤ 6 It’s true that Blake makes even larger claims for Paine, seeing in him “the Holy Ghost who
in Paine strives with Christendom as in Christ he strove with the Jews” (E 614). Paine denies that biblical prophets predicted the future,
condemns “humility,” and attacks “Mystery.” I don’t want to exaggerate the convergence: the
differences, too are important. Paine’s universe is an “immense machine,” which is compared to a mill,
to which Blake could well have replied in the words of THERE is NO Natural Religion: “The
same dull round even of a univer[s]e would soon become a mill with complicated wheels” (E 2). Blake
acknowledges a difference with Paine as well as with Watson when he writes “The Bishop never saw the
Everlasting Gospel any more than Tom Paine” (E 619). What Blake concentrates on in these annotations,
however, is the common ground he shares with Paine, not the differences between them.

Blake’s note on the back of Watson’s title page continues: “The Beast & the Whore rule
without control[x]” (E 611)—a sentence lightly crossed out, probably by the timorous hand of Samuel
Palmer, who later owned the book. As we see, Blake was at this point beginning to develop his symbolism of the
conjunction of the state with its established church. Blake could have said as did Coleridge, in a note to the
edition of his Religious Musings in 1797: “I am convinced that the Babylon of the
Apocalypse does not apply to Rome exclusively; but to the union of Religion with Power and Wealth, wherever it
is found” (Poems 89n). Blake’s most striking visual conceptualization of this to date
was the astonishing title page for Night the Eighth of Young’s Night Thoughts, showing the
scarlet woman with her cup
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of abominations mounted on a great red dragon whose seven grotesque heads embody the institutions of church
and state. Blake would later go on to elaborate this conception in pictures like The Whore of
Babylon and the Dante illustrations of Philip the Fair embracing Beatrice, and he would introduce it near
the end of Night the Eighth of The Four Zoas, where John of Patmos “saw the Harlot of the
Kings of Earth & saw her Cup / Of fornication food of Orc & Satan pressd from the fruit of Mystery”
(111:6-7, E 386). But when Blake annotated Watson’s Apology, this symbolism was relatively
fresh; as in so many other areas, we see it crystallizing in the later 1790s. At the same time, Blake was
expressing in his art some of the positive religious feeling that we do not find in the Lambeth books. Once
more we see this especially in the illustrations to Night Thoughts, with its images of Jesus
crucified, Jesus resurrected, and Jesus the True Vine. These are far from the more spiritually charged images
of Jesus Blake later produced—for example plate 76 of Jerusalem—but they do suggest the
direction in which he was tending more than anything he wrote at the time.

The argument between the Bishop and Paine is, as Blake perceives, deeply political, having to do
with “the English Crusade against France,” but it is cast in a theological form. Blake had probably
learned enough about what would come to be known as the Higher Criticism of the Bible, both from the writings
of Alexander Geddes, as Jerome McGann has argued,7↤ 7 McGann, “The Idea of an Indeterminate
Text.” and from the presence of Geddes in the Johnson circle, to see that the Regius Professor of
Divinity’s historical arguments were hopelessly out of touch. Paine attacks the evidence for the authorship
of the Pentateuch by Moses and for the witnessing of miracles by Jesus in the Gospels as a means of denying
the truth of the events that are recounted. Bishop Watson, as one would expect, defends the received accounts,
but he says that even if Moses, Joshua, and Samuel did not write the books attributed to them, they could
still be true, as they would have been assembled from “public records.” Blake at this point rejoins
“Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public RECORDS to be true” (E 617), anticipating
Byron’s satire on the Gazettes in Don Juan. Blake refers to Deuteronomy 31:24, which
begins “And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book . . .
.” If Moses didn’t write it, whoever did was a liar. This confutes the Bishop, but it actually isn’t
very important to Blake, for he adds “it ceases to be history & becomes a Poem of probable
impossibilities fabricated for pleasure as moderns say but I say by Inspiration” (E 616). It sounds as if
Blake were about to claim a different source for the authenticity of these books, especially when he writes
shortly afterwards “If historical facts can be written by inspiration Miltons Paradise Lost is as true as
Genesis. or Exodus” (E 617). We appear to be nearing the position of The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, in which Isaiah and Ezekiel say they derive their prophecies from the Poetic Genius and Isaiah
speaks of “all poets” as if they were members of one fraternity. Yet Blake is not actually prepared to
give this authority to the five books of Moses, because he objects to them on ethical grounds. “The
Wickedness of the Israelites in murdering so many thousands under pretence of a command from God is altogether
Abominable & Blasphemous” (E 614). So the divinity of the Bible depends as little on “inspiration”
as it does on historical facts. Blake goes on to say that it consists “in the Sentiments & Examples
which whether true or Parabolic are Equally useful as Examples given to us of the perverseness of some &
its consequent evil & the honesty of others & its consequent good” (E 618). What it comes down to is
a matter of conscience. When the Bishop rhetorically asks of conscience “Or is it merely our own judgment of
the moral rectitude and turpitude of our actions?” Blake underlined “Or is it merely” and wrote:
“Conscience in those that have it is unequivocal, it is the voice of God Our judgment of right and wrong is
reason” (E 613).

On the subject of miracles: the Bishop believed in them, Paine did not. Did Blake? Yes and no.
Blake points out that the Gospels were written after the fact, and he asserts “Jesus could not do miracles
where unbelief hinderd” (E 616). We seem to be back in the territory of The Marriage once
again, and of Ezekiel’s statement that all poets believe that a firm persuasion that a thing is so makes it
so, and that “in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains.” Indeed, after comparing the
miracle of the loaves and fishes with the effects of Paine’s Common Sense, Blake writes:

. . . look over the events of your own life & if you do not find that you have done such miracles and
lived by such you do not see as I do True I cannot do a miracle thro experiment & to domineer over &
prove to others my superior power as neither could Christ But I can & do work such as both astonish &
comfort me & mine. How can Paine the worker of miracles ever doubt Christs in the above sense of the word
miracle[.]
(E 617)

But what is “the above sense”? In the comparison with Common Sense the
miracle is a metaphor. In Blake’s reference to himself as a miracle worker, it is another kind
of metaphor, much the same as he used in a letter to George Cumberland on 26 August 1799: “As to Myself
about whom you are so kindly Interested. I live by Miracle” (E 704). That doesn’t tell us whether Blake
thought Jesus fed a multitude with loaves and fishes. Of course I am not trying to subject Blake (or even
Bishop Watson) to a theological cross-examination here. I just want to point out that when Blake asks how
Paine can ever doubt Christ’s miracles he is practicing
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a beautiful form of equivocation, and that this indicates something further about Blake’s position in
1798.

In response to Bishop Watson’s comparison of Moses to “the judge of the land in [carrying out
the law] condemning criminals to death,” Blake wrote: “All Penal Laws court Transgression & therefore
are cruelty & Murder” (E 618). This is not a Paineite position; it is a Godwinian one, and it is at the
same time profoundly antinomian in spirit. In his excellent discussion of antinomianism and Blake,
Dangerous Enthusiasm, John Mee has rightly stressed how important a component of Blake’s
beliefs antinomianism was in the 1790s, and the Annotations to Watson certainly bear him out. Seeing
all civil (and religious) institutions as evil is the negative pole of antinomianism; the
positive pole is seeing the divine within. We see a strong emphasis on this element in Blake’s writings of
the earlier 1790s, like The Marriage and Visions of the Daughters of
Albion.—“Life delights in life,” “every thing that lives is holy.”—In the Annotations we see
very little of that positive pole. Thomas Paine is an “Inspired Man” who gives himself to his “Energetic
Genius,” but nevertheless “the Best & the Whore rule without control[s].” There is a sense of
desperation in this vision of things; as Sandler puts it, “the last years of the 1790s apparently
constituted for Blake a crisis of faith and interpretation” (“Defending the Bible,” 44). After moving to
Felpham, of course, Blake would have a series of visionary experiences that profoundly affected the content of
his poetry and art. His later attitude is exemplified by the only written reference he would ever make to
Paine after these Annotations, written in the Notebook essay known under the editorial title “A Vision of
the Last Judgment”: “Many persons such as Paine & Voltaire, with some of the Ancient Greeks, say:
‘We will not converse concerning Good & Evil we will live in Paradise & Liberty You may do so in
Spirit but not in the <Mortal> Body as you pretend till after the Last Judgment . . . .’” (E 564).
The ground Blake had shared with Thomas Paine had disappeared, or to be more precise, had become irrelevant to
him.

I wish to close with a suggestion as to why Blake so stressed “this year 1798.” It brings us
back to Bishop Watson, who at the end of 1797 or very early in 1798, published an Address to the
British People in which, in addition to defending war taxes, he asserted that political reformers and
dissenters were loyal subjects and that they would resist a French invasion. This was an old theme of
Watson’s. The book became another bestseller thanks to government sponsorship, although Watson claimed in
the Anecdotes that he was not consulted on the government’s decision to print and give it
away gratis. Fourteen editions appeared in London alone. Not all reformers and dissenters were grateful to the
Bishop for his defense of their loyalty, however. In January 1798 Watson wrote: “On this and on other
occasions some violent men, whose views of political and ecclesiastical reform extended far beyond mine, were
filled with resentment against me, reproaching me with having changed my principles, and deserted the cause.
This accusation was wholly without foundation; for my principles were not republican principles, nor was my
cause their cause.” One of these dissenting dissenters was Gilbert Wakefield. In Watson’s words, “These
publications of mine had excited the displeasure of Mr. Gilbert Wakefield (one of the first scholars of the
age), and, unfortunately for himself, he published a pamphlet against them. The administration prosecuted him
for some of the expressions in his pamphlet, which they thought were seditious, and he was fined and
imprisoned. I took some pains to prevent this prosecution, thinking the liberty of the press to be the
palladium of the constitution; but I did not succeed in my endeavours” (Anecdotes 305). On
29 January 1799 Wakefield wrote to Watson asking the Bishop to be a character witness for him, but Watson
replied that as he had never met Wakefield, he could not be a witness as to his character, although he admired
Wakefield’s talents and would rejoice “at your being extricated from your present difficulty” (306).
Wakefield was not extricated—he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in May 1799—but I want to
return to the beginning of 1798, and Wakefield’s A Reply to the Bishop of Landaff’s Address
to the People of England.

Joseph Johnson had previously published at least one of Wakefield’s pamphlets,
Thoughts on Public Worship in 1792, but A Reply was published by J. Cuthell.
In it Wakefield asserted of “our corrupt and guilty ministries”:

They have occasioned a destruction of the human species infinitely tremendous beyond the most merciless
tyrants of ancient and modern times. . . .Land and sea is covered with the carcasses of their slain:—they
have engendered sham plots, false alarms, and visionary assassinations, for the purpose of deluding the
unwary, and to establish their own power by a military despotism, in due time, over England, like that, which
now tramples bleeding Ireland to the earth. (21-23)

In contradiction to the Bishop’s view, Wakefield argued that the poor had nothing to lose by a
French victory, and that if the French landed sixty or seventy thousand men in England, the kingdom would fall
to them. He also projected a millennial vision of the sort more frequently encountered at the beginning of the
decade than in 1798: “We, sons of peace, or see, or think we see, a gleam of glory through
the mist, which now envelopes our horizon. Great revolutions are accomplishing: a general fermentation is
working for the purpose of general refinement throughout the universe.” Cuthell was arrested immediately
after publication. Copies of the pamphlet were found in Johnson’s shop, and he was indicted on 11 January
1798. The charge was that “Joseph Johnson . . . being a malicious seditious and ill disposed person and
being greatly disaffected to our said sovereign
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Lord the King . . . wickedly and seditiously did publish and cause to be published a certain scandalous
malicious and seditious libel . . .”8↤ 8 See
Gerald Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
1979) 159. I am indebted to Tyson’s excellent book for the account of Johnson’s arrest and
trial.
Although Johnson would not be tried until July and his sentence was put off even further, the seriousness of
his position must have been evident from the start. Johnson had ever been a risk-taker, but never an imprudent
one. He had been the original publisher of part 1 of Paine’s Rights of Man but after only
a few copies had been sold, he transferred the book to J. S. Jordan. (Jordan was not prosecuted for this but
he too was arrested for selling Wakefield’s Reply.) Johnson certainly realized his danger.
He engaged as his lawyer the celebrated Thomas Erskine, the successful counsel for the defense in the State
Trials of 1794; and it has been suggested by Paul Magnusson (“The Politics of ‘Frost At Midnight’”)
that he published Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude volume in April 1798 as his part of a
joint effort to show that neither poet nor publisher was pro-French. Probably in the political atmosphere of
1798 nothing would have helped. He was eventually sentenced to six months’ in the King’s Bench Prison,
although as it turned out he served his sentence under the milder regimen of the Marshalsea, where he was
already incarcerated. Sometimes much is made of the comparative lightness of the sentence—to which one might
rejoin with Gulliver’s comment on the lenity of the King of Lilliput: “I could not
discover the lenity and favour of this sentence, but conceived it (perhaps erroneously) rather to be rigorous
than gentle.” It is true that, like other economically privileged prisoners, Johnson was able to entertain
while in jail and that he continued to hold his weekly dinners there. But the loss of personal freedom is in
itself an acute punishment—why else would it be inflicted?—and Johnson was well known to be physically
frail and suffering from asthma. Although he continued to be a publisher and bookseller after his release, his
activities were much reduced. It would have required no prophetic powers on Blake’s part to sense that this
(or worse) would be the outcome of Johnson’s arrest and prosecution.

The practical implications cannot, of course, be ignored—Blake could not ignore them. The year
1798 is a case in point. In that year only eight engravings by William Blake, all executed (probably after
Fuseli) in 1797, are known to have been published. All were in books published by Joseph Johnson: four
engravings for Charles Allen’s New and Improved History of England and four more for
Allen’s New and Improved Roman History. At some point such practical considerations merge
with Blake’s highest aspirations as artist and poet. Although Johnson and Blake were not close friends,
Johnson had nevertheless played a considerable role in Blake’s life. As I’ve mentioned, it must be through
Johnson that Blake met Paine, and it is likely that Blake at least occasionally attended Johnson’s Tuesday
dinners, giving him entree to a group of writers and other intellectuals with whom Blake had at least some
common interests. Johnson evidently encouraged Blake not only as an engraver but also as a poet and as an
artist. The first book of Blake’s poem The French Revolution was printed for Johnson in
1791, although the existence of this work is limited to a single set of proofs. (The reason for its
nonpublication remains unexplained.) Blake’s The Gates of Paradise when originally offered
in 1793 bore Johnson’s name as well as Blake’s as publisher. As Keri Davies has shown in a paper at a
previous Strawberry Hill conference, Johnson exhibited books by Blake, which must surely mean illuminated
books, at his place of business. And in the 1790s Johnson was, of course, Blake’s major employer. Blake’s
professional life as an engraver had become intertwined with Johnson as early as 1779. In 1783 Blake
contributed at least nine plates after other artists (including Thomas Stothard) to Johnson’s publication of
Joseph Ritson’s important Select Collection of English Songs. Blake’s work for Johnson
in the 1790s includes some of his most important engravings. Blake engraved six plates after his own designs
for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1791), and Johnson was also the
publisher of John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the
Revolted Negroes of Surinam, to which Blake contributed approximately 16 engravings executed between 1791
and 1794. Johnson ran against fashionable opinion in preferring Blake’s engraving to that of the more
fashionable Bartolozzi’s. Writing to Erasmus Darwin in connection with a projected engraving of the Portland
Vase in 1791, Johnson said: “Blake is certainly capable of making an exact copy of the vase, I believe more
so than Mr. B[artolozzi]” (Blake Records 43). This would have cheered Blake, who despised
what he called the “soft” quality of his rival’s work. The Botanic Garden, in which
Blake’s engravings of the Portland Vase appeared in 1791, also featured his powerful engraving after
Fuseli’s Fertilization of Egypt, and Blake later added an engraving, after Fuseli’s
Tornado, published in the third edition of 1795. Johnson also employed Blake on some purely
commercial tasks, but it is clear that he was one of the very few publishers in London who had a true
appreciation of Blake’s abilities as a designer and engraver of book illustrations. It’s possible to
regret that Johnson did not make Blake a protégé as he had Mary Wollstonecraft or that (as far as we know)
he did not value Blake’s painting as he did Henry Fuseli’s. It remains that no other employer played even
a remotely similar role in Blake’s life.

In addition to his employment of Blake, Johnson had published some of the most important liberal
and radical works of the 1790s. To take but one of many examples, Unitarian literature was one of Johnson’s
specialties, and
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Johnson remained Joseph Priestley’s publisher to the end of Priestley’s life. Rational dissent was no
doubt too rational for Blake, but Blake need not have completely agreed with the Unitarians to see that theirs
was one way of defending the Bible. (Johnson’s business would go on, but Priestley’s later letters are
full of complaints about his publisher’s dilatoriness.) And in addition to the public effect of Johnson’s
arrest, Blake may well have seen a more specific application to himself. I suggested a long time ago that the
arrest of Richard Brothers in 1795 and his consequent confinement in an insane asylum had a cautionary effect
on Blake. Brothers was charged with “unlawfully, maliciously, and wickedly writing, publishing, and printing
various fantastical prophecies, with intent to cause dissension and other disturbances within the
realm.”9↤ 9 See Paley, “William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and the Woman Clothed with the Sun,”
in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, year?)
260-93. Blake must have realized how
easily this law could have been applied to him, and the case of Brothers is likely to explain at least in part
why Blake stopped issuing illuminated books for over a decade after 1795. (The information provided in John
Barrell’s important essay “Imagining the King’s Death” could provide further material for this
argument.) Johnson was no prophet in the modern or any other sense of the word—he had ever tried to keep to
the windy side of the law—but his arrest for selling a book demonstrated the dangers of opposition all the
more. It could cost a man his life, or part of it. “I have been commanded from Hell not to print this,”
wrote Blake in his copy of Watson’s book, “as it is what our Enemies wish.” The poem
Vala, on which Blake was already working, was written out in a format that would have made it
virtually impossible to publish. In 1798 Blake had printed no poetry or prose of his own for over three years
(and with some very minor exceptions it would be at least a decade more until he did so).

In 1798 Blake realized that one period of his life had ended. It had been a period of enormous
activity during which Blake produced some of the works by which he is still best known. It had been a period
of exciting personal associations. And it had been a period of shared revolutionary hope, hope typified by the
author whom Blake defended in his Annotations. The optimism, expectation, and joy of that period are typified
in part of a letter that I would like to make the final words of this lecture. Upon getting news of the
publication of The Rights of Man in the spring of 1791, Thomas Holcroft wrote jubilantly to
William Godwin: “Hey for the New Jerusalem! The millennium! And peace and beatitude be unto the soul of
Thomas Paine.”10↤ 10 C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin, His Friends and
Contemporaries 1: 69.

Blake, William. Annotations to Richard Watson, An Apology for the Bible, in a
Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine. Ed. with an introduction by G. Ingli James. Cardiff:
University College Cardiff Press, 1984.

—. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982.